“Watching a good teacher manage a classroom is like being at mission control during a rocket launch — there's a lot going on at once. Mahalia Davis, in her fourth year as a teacher at Ridgeway Middle School in Memphis, Tenn., changed careers midlife to become a teacher. But she looks like she's been doing this forever,” Abramson writes.

The Gates Foundation for years was backing the small high school movement, or breaking buildings into schools within schools. But it has since shifted, and the MET Project's introduction cites a study of North Carolina high schools showing that having a class with a strong teacher produced results 14 times greater than having a class of five fewer students.

The new emphasis on improving teacher quality in part by creating new ways to evaluate educators.

The foundation is looking at test scores, but also surveying students and looking at video from teachers who volunteered in six school districts.

Abramson reports that the videos are created with a 360-degree camera that records the students and teacher as well as what happens on the board. Researchers then analyze what transpired.

More than 3,000 teachers volunteered to take part, and some reported being recorded made them more self-conscious, but prompted them to work harder to be more effective.

More than a dozen schools and groups are working with the foundation on the project, including the University of Michigan, and districts involved at Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Dallas, Denver, Florida's Hillsborough County, Memphis, New York and Pittsburgh.

As an MLive reader pointed out, Michigan's teacher of the year could be someone to learn from. Matinga Ragatz,teaches social studies and world language at Grand Ledge High School.